Amazon’s crackdown on remote work contrasts with Big Tech’s softer approach

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has not tolerated any dissent since he ordered employees back to the office three days a week in May of last year.

“If you can’t disagree and commit… it’s probably not going to work for you,” Jassy warned those who continued to complain during a public meeting in August 2023, ignoring an earlier strike by hundreds of disgruntled employees at its Seattle headquarters.

This week, Amazon doubled down. More than 300,000 of its employees worldwide were told to return to a traditional five-day work week starting in 2025, one of the strictest return-to-office policies among major tech groups.

“Before the pandemic, it wasn’t a given that people could work remotely two days a week, and that will be true going forward,” Jassy wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. “The benefits of being together in the office are significant… You need to be fully aligned with your teammates when inventing and solving difficult problems.”

In doing so, Jassy — who has been at Amazon since 1997, helped found Amazon Web Services, and replaced founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in mid-2021 — has become a symbol of a growing number of executives pushing for a full return to the office, including Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase and Elon Musk at Tesla.

While Amazon’s stance is less harsh than Musk’s — who told Tesla employees in 2022 that if they weren’t in the office for at least 40 hours a week they could “pretend to work somewhere else” — the policy puts Amazon at odds with most of its tech rivals.

According to software firm Flex Index, only 3% of tech companies with more than 25,000 employees have returned to work for five days in the office. Analyzed Policies of 2,670 companies. Nearly three-quarters of companies follow a structured hybrid model, and 23% offer fully flexible terms.

Apple, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft are among the companies that have settled, at least for now, on a hybrid work style, but even these more lenient policies have seen multiple reviews and continued resistance from employees.

In 2020, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook, now called Meta, would become “the most advanced company for remote work.” Last year, Zuckerberg called all of Meta’s roughly 70,000 employees into the office at least three days a week.

In June of last year, Google’s head of human resources told employees that fully remote work would only be allowed “in exceptional circumstances.” She added that employees’ attendance at the office would be monitored through employee ID badges and would be taken into account when reviewing their performance and promotions.

Apple gradually added more days to its “back to office” requirements throughout 2022, starting with just one day in March and reaching three days by August, despite resistance from some of its 160,000 workers.

Even Zoom, whose software facilitated much of the initial surge in remote work during the pandemic, said in August of last year that any employee living within 50 miles of the office would be required to come to work at least two days a week.

Other tech groups, including Netflix and Nvidia, have yet to issue a firm global mandate for in-person office attendance.

Other leaders will be watching Amazon’s hard-line experiment closely when it begins on Jan. 2. At a town hall in August 2023, Jassy said that “dozens” of other CEOs he spoke to felt the same way about remote work and “almost all” of them want employees to return to work in person full time.

T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert has encouraged rival companies to bring their employees back to the office as well, telling business leaders at a May Technology Alliance event in Seattle: “You all need to get back to the office.”

But many remain wary of breaking the fragile truce and see hybrid contracts as an advantage in hiring younger talent in engineering and programming, as well as candidates from more diverse backgrounds, for whom flexibility is often a priority.

“We certainly have no plans to do that. [the same]“It’s like shooting themselves in the foot,” said one executive at a competing big tech company on the West Coast.

“Any company that implements a top-down forced return to the office policy will lose some of its best performers, because top performers always have outside options,” said Prithwiraj Chowdhury, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Research from the University of Pennsylvania found that remote jobs in tech groups attracted 15% more female applicants and 33% more applicants from underrepresented minorities in the sector.

Some Amazon employees have complained online. One posted on LinkedIn that he was looking for a new job, calling the five-day period “unfortunate because I’m interested in working for a living, not playing live action and virtue signaling.”

But there’s little chance the company will back down. Jassy put the policy at the heart of measures designed to revive Amazon’s famously strict “Day One” culture, which Bezos imposed in the early years. One of the names Bezos chose for the company was Relentless.com, and the domain still redirects to Amazon.com today.

Executives worry about a waning startup spirit and entrenched bureaucracy as the company grows to 1.5 million employees and expands its business from e-commerce to cloud computing, health care and self-driving cars.

“As we’ve grown … we’ve also added more layers than we had before,” Jassy said in a note this week. “We’ve created artifacts that we’d like to change — for example, pre-meetings to pre-decision meetings — that create additional costs and waste valuable time.”

Amazon has shown a willingness to enforce its rules in the office. After implementing a three-day mandate last year, the company monitored employees’ attendance via their ID cards and sent out reprimanding emails to those who didn’t meet the minimum requirements, the Financial Times reported at the time.

A number of middle managers are also set to be laid off — as many as 7,000 of them could save $700 million a year, according to estimates by Bank of America analyst Justin Post — in addition to the 27,000 employees Amazon said it would lay off last year to cut costs and reshape its bloated corporate operations.

“It’s not clear why Amazon is doing this,” says Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University. “If Amazon wants to cut headcount, this is one way to do it — but the only group it will leave behind are high performers.”

Amazon’s shift may be driven, in part, by research from Stanford Business School that showed workers were more innovative and creative in face-to-face meetings, Bloom added, though he noted that “that doesn’t mean you have to go there every day.”

His own research, published in July, found that hybrid work was no less productive than full in-person work — although fully remote work was associated with a productivity drop of about 10 percent.

A tight labor market as the post-pandemic hiring boom has subsided has encouraged executives who want employees back, shifting the balance of power back toward employers. Tech companies have cut 263,000 jobs in 2023 and tens of thousands more this year.

If the move succeeds, Amazon’s stance could spread more widely. “We haven’t settled on the norms of post-Covid working,” says David D’Souza, membership director at the Chartered Institute of Human Resources, the UK’s professional body for human resources. “Whenever a prominent company like Amazon makes a decision like this, it triggers similar discussions in other organisations too.”